The disclosed embodiments of the present invention relate to using a pin-to-pin interface for receiving data signal(s) and clock signal(s), and more particularly, to a reconfigurable pin-to-pin interface capable of supporting different lane combinations and/or different physical layers and associated method.
A camera interface may be a pin-to-pin interface disposed between a first chip and a second chip to transmit multimedia data from the first chip to the second chip for further processing. For example, the first chip may include a camera module, and the second chip may include an image signal processor (ISP). The multimedia data may include image data (i.e., a single captured image) or video data (i.e., a video sequence composed of captured images). Multi-camera usage is popular in mobile and automotive applications, and it requires more and more camera interface macros. In a typical design, one camera interface is dedicated to one camera module only. When an application (e.g., a mobile phone or an automobile) is equipped with front and rear dual cameras, four camera interfaces are needed. Further, a compatible solution for multiple physical layers will be the trend. A traditional design is using two specialized camera interfaces to support two physical layers, individually. If an application (e.g., a mobile phone or an automobile) is configured to support multiple cameras and multiple physical layers, the chip area/cost is increased inevitably.